Apr 2020-Mar 2021

Math-Fi seminar on 22 Oct.

2020.10.22 Thu up
  • Date: 22 Oct. (Thu.)
  • Place: On the Web
  • Time: 16:30 – 18:00
  • Speaker: Huyen Pham (Paris VII)
  • Title: Control of McKean-Vlasov systems and applications
  • Abstract: 
This lecture is concerned with the optimal control of McKean-Vlasov equations, which has been knowing a surge of  interest since the emergence of the mean-field game theory.  Such control problem corresponds to the asymptotic formulation of a N-player cooperative game under mean-field interaction, and can also be viewed as an influencer strategy problem over an interacting large population. It finds various applications in economy, finance, or social sciences for modelling motion of socially interacting individuals and herd behavior.  It is also relevant for dealing with intermittence questions arising typically in risk management.
In the first part,  I will focus on the discrete-time case,  which extends the theory of Markov decision processes (MDP) to the mean-field interaction context.  We give an application with explicit results to a problem of targeted advertising via social networks.
The second part is devoted to the continuous-time framework. We shall first consider the important class of linear-quadratic McKean-Vlasov (LQMKV) control problem, which provides a major source for examples and applications. We show a direct and elementary method for solving explicitly LQMKV based on a mean version of the well-known martingale optimality principle in optimal control, and the completion of squares technique.  Next, we present the dynamic programming approach (in other words, the time consistency approach) for the control of general McKean-Vlasov dynamics. In particular, we introduce the recent mathematical tools that have been developed in this context : differentiability in the Wasserstein space of  probability measures, Itô formula along a flow of probability measures and Master Bellman equation. Some extensions to common noise, partial observation, stochastic differential games of McKean-Vlasov type are also discussed.

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